The company is billing itself as a more private money-transfer service that’ll beat companies like Venmo to the market in Southeast Asia. Users can transfer money within private groups, as well as chat, but it’s not about making those transactions public, co-founder Moses Lo said. Since starting the beta a few months ago, the company has 13,000 people using the service.

Robinhood, a startup promising free stock trades, made a strong showing in rankings for Google Play store finance apps, coming in at No. 7, putting it ahead of Google Wallet, Venmo, Citibank, and US Bank.

Based in Palo Alto, Calif., Robinhood has $66 million in funding and is commonly cited as an attractive acquisition target for any institution wanting to work with millennials, meaning everyone.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Wednesday allowed 11 business houses, including Reliance Industries, the Aditya Birla group and leading telecom companies Airtel and Vodafone to start payments banks.

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A key investor in companies at the forefront of financial innovation, Burbidge is concerned that gender stereotyping is a real problem. But despite a recent controversy over diversity in Silicon Valley, she does not feel being a woman in her industry has held her back.

This ability to pack an Internet connection into essentially any physical object will have some huge implications for the insurance industry over the next decade. As insurers look for ways to innovate their policies and claims practices, your home, health and auto coverage plans will become more connected to your smart devices — and more personalized to your behavior.

If you take a look at all the news about fintech startups, you might get a feeling that the new financial services are built for retail clients and not for businesses. However, these are the entrepreneurs who may become drivers of fintech, especially in Asia.

On a sweltering afternoon in July, Tom Blomfield emerges from Bank of England offices in the heart of the City of London and promptly sheds his suit jacket. Blomfield, the 29-year-old, bearded CEO of Mondo, a startup smartphone bank that’s applying to operate in the U.K., isn’t the suit-wearing type. He’s eager to get back to his Clerkenwell workspace for a beer to celebrate Mondo’s surmounting a big hurdle in its quest for a banking license.

Banks can’t really pick and choose a small subset of use cases and claim they are embracing the revolution. If you use “blockchains without bitcoin” just to avoid public blockchains, you will be subjected to a huge market blind spot because there are millions of users that want to trade with bitcoin, and you’ll be insulated from them.

The blockchain is a distributed ledger – a shared digital record of asset ownership – that many believe could increase efficiency and reduce costs in financial markets.

Financial News spoke to Fredrik Voss, vice president and head of blockchain strategy at Nasdaq, about how the deployment is progressing and what other blockchain projects are in the works at the US-based exchange group.